22.00.0055: Thoughts on tags

20-29 Community 22 Blog
1

A question at r/datacurator once again brings up the topic of tags vs. folders.

I say ‘once again’ because – and there’s no judgement here, it’s just a statement of fact – the good folks at r/datacurator seem really keen on tags.

Tags: what?

My system says that you should find the category that a thing belongs to – note my emphasis on the singular – and put the thing in that category. So your travel is 16 Travel and a trip is 16.37 Uruguay.

As with most things in life, there are two sides to the story. Categories are powerful because they force you to choose. That trip makes a lot of sense in travel, and you’re going to find it easily.

On the other hand, not everything fits neatly in a single category. Recipes are a good example, and one that I touched on in 22.00.0014 Categorisation.

Because you might cook Pad Ka-Prao Moo for dinner[1], and you want to store it in your recipe manager. What category is it?

Thai, obviously. Oh and dinner. Aah, and pork. And spicy. And goes with rice, and quick and cheap and impressive yet simple.

We clearly have a problem. See also: music, photographs, your movie collection, and many other things.

Tags allow you to assign multiple tags to a thing. It’s how my recipe app does things. It makes a lot of sense.

Sometimes.

The problem with tags

So you’ve decided to use tags. Great! Prob-lem solved.

Except now you have to organise your tags.

Let’s have a look at the list of genres in Apple Music. A quick count tells me that there are about 65 to choose from, and I haven’t added any of my own.

There’s electronic, electronica, house, IDM/experimental, techno, and trance, all of which could plausibly describe the same track.

And there’s no consistency. You might tag one track as electronic and a similar track as electronica on different days just because that’s the mood you were in at the time.

Back to r/datacurator

So the crew over on Reddit recommend to people that they use the tagging feature built in to their file system to tag documents:

You can use a single file system, but you should try to use some kind of metadata classification so you can can add additional per unit classification.
NTFS used in windows has space for metadata.

If you didn’t read the thread, the person is asking how to organise documents for their small business. And the suggestion is to use metadata per-file to add tags to, what, each document? For real?

And, to be clear, this means that you do not need a folder hierarchy. Because everything’s tagged! Just chuck it all in one big bucket.

I think this is really impractical advice.

My experience at work

I’ve seen this tried at work. SharePoint[2] lets you set up document libraries controlled by tags.

It is, without exception, total chaos.

The case for tags

I’m not saying that tags are bad. They’re great for your recipe app, or your photos.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why it might be a good idea to use Johnny.Decimal to organise your tags. :exploding_head:

But now, I have to cook.

  1. Guess what’s for dinner. ↩︎

  2. SharePoint is a horrible Microsoft product that people who work in large organisations have to use. If you’ve never heard of it I genuinely envy you. ↩︎

2 Likes
2

A follow-up.

Following on from ‘thoughts on tags’ the other day, my idea — which I have not tested — is that you might organise your tags using the Johnny.Decimal system.

The problem was that we had, say, 65 music genres. In a flat list. With many that felt like they overlapped with each other.

So just apply the principles of this system to the tags themselves. And I think you could treat a tag as being analogous to a category; you don’t need to go all the way to IDs.

Those music genres might then become:

10-19 Rock
   11 Hard/metal
   12 Progressive
   13 Alternative

20-29 Electronic
   21 Ambient
   22 Techno/dance
   23 Synthwave 

30-39 Blues & country
   31 Gospel
   32 Americana

…or whatever, you get the idea.

The point is that you apply the basic principles to your tags: only two deep, no more than ten, and so on.

Tagging photos

The obvious use-case is photos. I don’t bother tagging mine,[1] but many people do. So build a tagging structure that has whatever you need: location, scene, people, mood.

If anyone tries this out, let me know.

  1. My photo library is a hot mess. It’s not organised at all. ↩︎

2 Likes
3

Interesting rabbit hole I should dig into.

1 Like
4

I don’t think it’s fair to say that because systems organised with tags usually end up messy means that tags themselves are the problem - the people using them in such fashion are! After all, systems organised with folders are usually messy, unless we put some structure in place - be it JD or any other structure. So folders, tags, they’re all tools in our toolbelt, each have their respective use, both benefits and downsides, and we, as users, need to learn how to use them efficiently and in such a way that brings order, not chaos to our systems.

2 Likes
5

Totally agreed, and I’ve been mulling this very topic myself. Tags can be super useful, but are sprawl-prone because they often don’t obviously have to conform to a structure.

When you’re in an index or a JD file system it’s clear that there’s a specified structure for things, and that you really need to conform to that structure. With tags, particularly at a workplace where you can simply add whatever you want, things aren’t so clear. I think this is where a lot of the downsides would arise.

I plan on using some tags, and they’ll conform to a category (that points me to a thing) or a specific bit of metadata that helps the system operate. As long as all roads land you a the same destination, they’ll help.

The idea of a "Location: " entry in a note is, to me, a tag - after all, a tag is simply metadata. And it’s useful because it conforms to an understood rule of a given system, e.g.:

..some stuff may be only located in this index, or on this computer, or an external system.

This tag will indicate where that thing is located, but only if it conforms to the Location: standard.

6

Fair points @rxlecky. And yeah @MattC we stumbled across this when Lucy was creating her index: because I hadn’t shown her how to use Apple Notes’ hashtags yet, she just recorded her location as text.

So she forgot that she’d used gmail as a location and used email later. (Which she then realised and corrected.)

Hashtags alas don’t auto-suggest/complete in Notes, but at least they’re more visible in the sidebar there and this might prevent such mistakes.

So yeah, don’t get me wrong. Not totally hating on tags; they have a place.

7

a few comments. I’ve tended only to use tags in my Obsidian for places (e.g. location of files). There is a great community plug-in called Tag Wrangler, which tabulates all tags and permits en bloc renaming to help with the consistency issue.

1 Like
8

Ah, tags, so much to say about tags! Tags and categories!

I agree with all of the above; tags and categories are both useful tools which need to be used with skill and precision. In the case of tools like this, that means putting thought and effort into designing before you use.

maybe tags should be metadata

Personally, I’ve gravitated to the metadata approach to tags. I try to use tags exclusively for features of files/notes/things which are important for my workflow, but cannot be derived from the contents. In my case, that’s mainly actionability.

I think of tags as brightly coloured sticky notes I would put on something to remind me of action that needs to be taken, as in this sketch of my kitchen:

IMG_20240705_073720
IMG_20240705_0737201685×1422 205 KB

“tea is low!” “cleaning soda is low!” “time to clean out the odour trap”!

To this end, I’m doing an experiment in which I limit myself to ten tags. I’ll write more about that elsewhere.

Thoughts on tags from another community: zettelkasten.de

I won’t get into a long exposition on tags. These two link make for interesting reading.[1]

  • Why Categories for Your Note Archive are a Bad Idea Obviously argues that categories don’t work for a Zettelkasten-style body of research notes where the ‘emergent connections’ are the whole point. But in setting up the argument, also describes well how categories are perfect for other types of bodies of knowledge (like what a JD system is trying to achieve).
  • A forum thread discussing the above article.. The idea of tags as metadata comes up. So does the example of recipes; that part illustrates well, I think, how unclear the idea of tags is for that kind of purpose. ‘Object’ tags versus ‘topic’ tags … I kinda get what they’re saying, but still not quite. Some good insights lower down the thread.

Photos – would albums be enough?

Just to return to the original topic, of organising your tags with a JD hierarchy. I’m planning on doing my photos without tags, mostly. I’ve been so impressed with how I always discover one place where everything belongs best, that I’m going on a hunch it will work for photos too.

So take this photo of the rose against the East wall of my house:

IMG_20240621_060922
IMG_20240621_0609221920×2560 336 KB

You could tag this in all sorts of ways, trying to anticipate all the ways you might want to find this photo in the future: exterior, plant, rose, cloudy, summer, house, building, my_house … at this point, I think why not just give the photo a title East end of our house with rose bush in bloom and voila, a full-text index (or just ripgrep) does the trick.

So I think I’m going to put thought into creating a hierarchy of photo albums just like everything else in my system. The ‘rearranging sticky notes’ step. Then this photo will probably end up in an album (and ID) Mari Kita Exterior. (Yes, my house has a name). Other albums might be Mari Kita Interior and The Garden at Mari Kita (for where the garden takes up most of the field of view).

Ah, you might object: if you classify photos like this, after years and years you’ll have so many in one album that you won’t be able to find the photo of the rose bush!

True. There might be a use for tags. But I think this is the premature optimisation fallacy. And there are also other ways to slice it. For example, humans remember when things happened pretty well. Or maybe photos could be part of multiple albums. Or you could have a nested album structure to break the search down into an obvious choice tree. Oh, and don’t forget full-text search on the title!

Categories for music and recipes

Well, there are lots and lots more thoughts and nuances and such on this topic, But I’ll leave it at that for now except for one closing thought:

I wonder if this would work for recipes and music albums too?

Tags are good for a public library where lots of people might come looking who don’t know what’s in it. People who know they like ‘Hard metal’ and want to browse what’s available in that style. But for your own personal music collection: you probably know every cd in there pretty well. So organise those by name.

And similarly with recipes: maybe instead of trying to create the perfect, non-overlapping tag taxonomy for all the world’s cuisines (a pretty hard task), why not take a moment to give each recipe a title/description which captures the essence of the context in which it became meaningful to you? Thai basil pork from that YouTube FPV channel which we made for my birthday party in 2025 when Aunt Jemima found a weevil in her rice. I bet you could find this recipe a year from now, couldn’t you?

And all the other things like spicy and goes with rice – well, duh :wink:

  1. I was a Zettelkasten fanboy for quite a while, but eventually realized maybe it wasn’t my fault I could never find important information relating to my own thought process. The eye-opener was discovering Dendron’s hierarchical format and realized this fit notes on software development so much better. Some things just are hierarchical! And I eventually found Johnny Decimal which adds premeditated structure to the typology, which is what makes typologies useful by eliminating possible ambiguity and overlap. ↩︎

9

Note – I should perhaps say I realize many people here and elsewhere have put a lot of thought into these topics – I don’t mean to come across as if I know better. Sometimes concrete examples help, though, to move discussions along.

10

All good, Hans! Love all the ideas :smiley: and the hand-drawn diagrams!